Robert Alden Fales, the fifteen-year-old criminal chloroformist.

An ex-employee of a Newark straw hat factory, 15-year-old Robert Alden Fales battered the factory's cashier Thomas Haydon on the head multiple times with a wooden staff. Fales then applied a chloroform-soaked handkerchief to Haydon's nose until the cashier stopped moving. Arrested and convicted of murder, Fales had his death sentence commuted to life imprisonment. At 23 years of age, the criminal chloroformist died in jail from tuberculosis.

At the borders of the average man: Adolphe Quêtelet on mental, moral, and criminal monstrosities.

This study examines Adolphe Quêtelet's conception of deviance. It investigates how he identified social marginalities and what actions he recommended governments to undertake. To get a close understanding of his views, this paper examines three cases of "monstrosities," namely mental alienation, drunkenness, and criminality. My main thesis is that Quêtelet provided scientific authority to a conception of deviance as sickness, immorality, and cost thus encouraging legislators to use statistics for containing social marginalities. The case of alienation shows that Quêtelet viewed insanity as a pathology of civilization to be understood through phrenology. The case of drunkenness demonstrates how Quêtelet conflated the notion of statistical mean with moral decency. The case of criminality illustrates Quêtelet's major concern with the cost of criminals for the state. While advocating for the perfectibility of mankind, Quêtelet urged governments to take actions against what he considered the monstrosities of society.

Born criminal? Differences in structural, functional and behavioural lateralization between criminals and noncriminals.

Over 100 years ago Lombroso [(1876/2006). Criminal man. Durham: Duke University Press] proposed a biological basis for criminality. Based on inspection of criminals' skulls he theorized that an imbalance of the cerebral hemispheres was amongst 18 distinguishing features of the criminal brain. Specifically, criminals were less lateralized than noncriminals. As the advent of neuroscientific techniques makes more fine-grained inspection of differences in brain structure and function possible, we review criminals' and noncriminals' structural, functional, and behavioural lateralization to evaluate the merits of Lombroso's thesis and investigate the evidence for the biological underpinning of criminal behaviour. Although the body of research is presently small, it appears consistent with Lombroso's proposal: criminal psychopaths' brains show atypical structural asymmetries, with reduced right hemisphere grey and white matter volumes, and abnormal interhemispheric connectivity. Functional asymmetries are also atypical, with criminal psychopaths showing a less lateralized cortical response than noncriminals across verbal, visuo-spatial, and emotional tasks. Finally, the incidence of non-right-handedness is higher in criminal than non-criminal populations, consistent with reduced cortical lateralization. Thus despite Lombroso's comparatively primitive and inferential research methods, his conclusion that criminals' lateralization differs from that of noncriminals is borne out by the neuroscientific research. How atypical cortical asymmetries predispose criminal behaviour remains to be determined.

["Epidemic" or Peripheral Phenomenon? : A Medical History of the "Cocaine Wave" in the Weimar Republic]. / "Volksseuche" oder Randerscheinung? : Die "Kokainwelle" in der Weimarer Republik aus medizinhistorischer Sicht.

An empirical investigation refutes the popular conception that excessive drug usage was a widespread social phenomenon in the Weimar Republic. Although physicians warned the public and politicians of a "cocaine wave" that threatened the public health, there is no evidence that indicates a significant increase of cocaine use during the twenties. The decisive cause for this moral panic was caused instead by the disease pattern of "Cocainism". The addiction carried the imprint of an infectious disease and would destroy the body, the will, and the civic life of its victims. According to medical doctrine, chronic cocaine consumption also produced the tendency towards deviant sexual activities and criminal activity. For this reason, the use of this substance was in particular linked to deviant social milieus like the so-called Bohemian or demimonde. However, historical sources in fact show that it was primarily a problem of the medical professions. Against the background of the desperate political, social and economic situation in Germany after the First World War, physicians regarded cocaine and morphine addictions as a threat to the hoped for political and biological renewal of the nation.

'A disease that makes criminals': encephalitis lethargica (EL) in children, mental deficiency, and the 1927 Mental Deficiency Act.

Encephalitis lethargica (EL) was an epidemic that spread throughout Europe and North America during the 1920s. Although it could affect both children and adults alike, there were a strange series of chronic symptoms that exclusively affected its younger victims: behavioural disorders which could include criminal propensities. In Britain, which had passed the Mental Deficiency Act in 1913, the concept of mental deficiency was well understood when EL appeared. However, EL defied some of the basic precepts of mental deficiency to such an extent that amendments were made to the Mental Deficiency Act in 1927. I examine how clinicians approached the sequelae of EL in children during the 1920s, and how their work and the social problem that these children posed eventually led to changes in the legal definition of mental deficiency. EL serves as an example of how diseases are not only framed by the society they emerge in, but can also help to frame and change existing concepts within that same society.